The Anniversary: And Other Stories

By Louis Auchincloss

From a New York Times–bestselling author: A collection of short fiction “reminiscent of the work of Henry James and Edith Wharton” (Library Journal).
 
Crisscrossing a tumultuous century, these stories evoke lives both blessed and cursed by good fortune and reveal the quotidian conflicts of a wonderfully rich milieu. Here are vignettes that capture the loves and jealousies of marriage and friendship, recall days of a rarefied aristocracy, and hint at a new, ambitious young elite.
 
In the title story, a tour de force of humor and emotion, a clergyman prepares a toast for his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary but gets stuck when it comes to his wife’s five-year affair. The narrator in “DeCicco v. Schweizer” imagines the lives of the plaintiff and defendant and spins a wicked tale about a 1902 marriage born more of convenience than of love. And in “The Last of the Great Courtesans,” we meet the unforgettable Milly Marion, born in 1917, who has bewitched everyone she has met in her long, colorful life.
 
Whether these stories concern an anxious draft dodger, a repentant headmaster, or a mischievous writer who ill-advisedly draws from her own family for her fiction, they all offer soulful glimpses into an uncommon world, preserved in our past and yet surprisingly close to our hearts.
 
“His themes are universal—ambition, greed, disappointment, compromise. Some of the most memorable characters are women, trying to find their way in a time of more restricted choices . . . It’s easy to get lost in the author’s elegant and restrained prose.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 15, 1999
• ISBN: 9780547946993

Louis Auchincloss

Louis Auchincloss was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.

Book preview

Copyright © 1999 by Louis Auchincloss

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINT EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Auchincloss, Louis.

The anniversary and other stories / Louis Auchincloss.

p. cm.

Contents: DeCicco v. Schweizer—The interlude—The anniversary—Man of the Renaissance—The last of the great courtesans—The devil and Guy Lansing—The facts of fiction—The Virgina redbird—The veterans.

ISBN 0-395-97074-1

1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3501.U25A74 1999 813'.54—dc21

99-18697 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-94699-3

v1.0613

For my granddaughter,

ELIZABETH MARVEL AUCHINCLOSS

DeCicco v. Schweizer

Prologue

WHEN I ENROLLED in the University of Virginia Law School in the autumn of 1938, I had resolved to abandon forever my early abortive attempts to write fiction and devote myself heart and soul to the rigors of my new profession. And for a while I was faithful to that purpose. But I soon discovered a siren on the banks of the new river on which I paddled that drew me ineluctably back to the muse I had sought to forsake. The lyrics of the siren’s song were the mellifluous prose of Benjamin Cardozo, whose common law opinions from his Albany bench were then generally received by the bar as the finest-wrought statements of jurisprudence that we had—excepting only those of Marshall and Holmes. Cardozo’s reputation has not gone without sharp challenge in our own day, but I impenitently remain the disciple I became in 1938.

I had taken, at the start of my legal studies, the arbitrary and immature position that there was no true meeting point between law and literature, that the former was dry and practical and part of the world of economic profit to which men, average men anyway, had to bind themselves, and that the latter was a fantasy of color and delight, the plaything of the intellectually privileged, of those rare geniuses whose talent exempted them from the toil of the masses. When Cardozo, however, in the opinions that I now studied, would outline the tissue of events that had resulted in the litigation before him and fit them into the golden straitjacket of law, I found myself wonderfully returned to the world of my favorite masters of American fiction: the world of Hawthorne, of Dreiser, of Edith Wharton, even of Henry James.

I was particularly drawn to the case of DeCicco v. Schweizer, perhaps because it was a case in contracts, which had become my favorite course. The facts were these: on January 2, 1902, one Joseph Schweizer instructed his attorney to draw up and deliver to his daughter, Blanche, and her betrothed, Count Gulinelli of Ferrara, a document in which he committed himself to pay Blanche an annuity of $2500 commencing on the day of her marriage. Four days later the couple were wed, and the sum due was presumably paid each year until 1912 when the plaintiff, one DeCicco, to whom the document had been assigned by the count and countess, presented it to Schweizer, who refused payment on the ground that no consideration had been paid him for his promise. Consideration, as every first-year law student promptly learns, is the quid pro quo that makes a promise enforceable at law. If nothing is given to him who makes the offer, nothing can be required of him. But Cardozo and his fellow judges found for the plaintiff on the ground that Blanche and her betrothed had indeed given her father something in exchange for his offer: they had chosen not to exercise their undoubted privilege to break their engagement and had fulfilled at the altar the condition that activated his commitment.

It didn’t matter that they may have never wished or intended to break their troth, or that they may have regarded themselves as morally bound to fulfill it, or even that Schweizer may never have meant them to feel they had to go through with a ceremony unless both were so inclined. The fact remained that Blanche’s father had promised to pay his money on a certain condition, and that this condition had been met by the two promisees who had been free not to meet it.

Cardozo’s opinion offered a good example of his literary style:

He [Schweizer] offered this inducement to both while they were free to retract or to delay. That they neither retracted nor delayed is certain. It is not to be expected that they should lay bare all the motives and promptings, some avowed and conscious, others perhaps half-conscious and inarticulate, which swayed their conduct. It is enough that the natural consequence of the defendant’s promise was to induce them to put the thought of rescission or delay aside.... It will not do to divert the minds of others from a given line of conduct, and then to urge that because of the diversion the opportunity has gone by to say how their minds might otherwise have acted. If the tendency of the promise is to induce them to persevere, reliance and detriment may be inferred from the mere act of performance. The springs of conduct are subtle and varied. One who meddles with them must not insist upon too nice a measure of proof that the spring which he released was effective to the exclusion of all others.

Did not fiction and law come together in this opinion, not as antagonists (as I had foolishly once viewed them), but rather as partners to investigate and even make sense out of the human condition? For if the court had the job of deciding whether the plaintiff DeCicco should collect on his assignment (even though one suspects he purchased it at a fearful discount), is not the novelist concerned with the motives and promptings of human conduct, some avowed, some only half conscious, the subtle and varied springs of conduct, which the court must ignore? To each his own. But Cardozo might have been a novelist himself. Indeed, had he had a better writer as a tutor in his boyhood than the later famed Horatio Alger, perhaps he might!

The marriage of American heiresses to European noblemen was a common enough social phenomenon of Blanche Schweizer’s era, often romanticized and just as often deplored in the press, in fiction, in plays and, ultimately, on the screen. In fiction the most elegant and lacquered example is found in James’s The Golden Bowl, which deals with the marriage of Maggie Verver, most opulent of American heiresses, and Prince Amerigo, noblest of Italian peers. The shabby little facts of the Schweizer case seem a long way from the glittering world of The Golden Bowl, but in Cardozo’s opinion the principle of law that emerges from them is like refined steel from crude ore.

I know nothing of the facts of the case other than what is set down in the opinion. Did the marriage last? We know that Blanche and her husband executed the assignment a decade after their wedding, but we do not know whether they were still happily joined. They must have been hard pressed financially to have been reduced to that extreme. And why had the annuity been offered at all, only four days before the wedding? Was Gulinelli threatening to pull out? Yet he must have been really broke if he would marry for so small a sum, even considering its greater purchasing power in 1902. Or had the offer been an addition to a previously made settlement? Was it possible that Blanche was using a last-minute ploy to extract an additional sum from her father by threatening her mother with the disgrace of a cancelled wedding now that the invitations were out and the presents in? Or had Schweizer, beaming over a recent coup in the market, been moved to crown any previous gifts with a final one?

I had eventually to satisfy my curiosity about the Schweizer case in the only way a novelist can, by making up my own version, and that is what follows. I set it in the form of Blanche’s memoirs, penned in her old age, after the other principals of her story were dead:

Now It Can Be Told

AN EXCERPT FROM

THE FORTHCOMING AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

COUNTESS BLANCHE GULINELLI

Style Magazine, August 1955

NOTHING IS MORE COMMON, in probing the shadowy background of childhood, than for a writer to overemphasize the role of her parents—and, particularly in American lives, that of the mother. Cherchez la mère is the inevitable cry. And far be it from me to say that the role of mine was not crucial, as I shall duly relate. But what is often overlooked in the backgrounds of the well-to-do, particularly in the America of the eighteen eighties and nineties when immigration had filled their households with cheap foreign help, is the importance of servants in whose care the children were so largely left. My governess, Miss Hankinson, an Englishwoman, daughter of a poor but very respectable curate, had been flung penniless on the world at his death, armed only with a bristling virtue, of which her angular spinster frame and long-nosed physiognomy gave her little need, an education centered in romantic poetry, particularly Lord Tennyson’s, and a rock-ribbed social snobbishness. It was perfectly evident to me from the beginning of her lengthy tenure that she looked down on my parents, as well as their noisy friends and their pompous Beaux-Arts town house on Riverside Drive.

For, as Miss Hankinson could easily see, my family was not really in society at all, as our West Side residence alone would have told me had I been older. Mother was what was known as a fine figure of a woman, certainly tall and handsome enough, unlike poor brown undersized me, whose sad looks and skinny body were the target of her constant sarcasms, but even my young eyes could make out that she was overdressed. It was probably her passion to dominate that led her to content herself with her Riverside group, but she certainly cast more than one resentful glance across Central Park to where Mrs. Astor held sway over a larger and more glittering domain. Things, however, were probably just as well as they were, for Mother’s terrible tantrums would have constituted a definite hurdle in any attempt on her part to climb the ladders of Fifth Avenue or Newport. And then, too, we weren’t nearly rich enough for that game. We lived lavishly, but we spent all we had and more.

Father had a temper equal to Mother’s, but by some kind of tacit understanding, in the interest, perhaps, of a common survival, they seemed to have agreed that only one would blow at a time. He was large and red-faced and stentorian, at times rather ominously Germanic; he inclined to dress in loud British tweeds and to shout at servants and office clerks. His businesses were various; he was always in and out of things, investing in this or that, highly speculative, and one was never quite sure whether tomorrow would bring a diamond as big as the Ritz or a mail full of dunning letters. He treated me with a sometimes benign condescension unless he spotted something to criticize, and then he would bellow.

Miss Hankinson provided me with at least a simulacrum of the love that I missed in family life, and indeed she remained with me until she died, following me to Italy after my marriage and gallantly learning the language and adapting herself, as well as she could, to the shabby genteel poverty of our life in Ferrara. In some ways, however, it was the least she could do for me, as she, quite as much as my mother, though for very different reasons, was responsible for my ultimate agreement to marry Count Gulinelli. But before that time, alone and friendless in her fifth-floor room on Riverside Drive, watching the winter wind ruffle the bleak Hudson, Hanky, as I called her, had given her whole heart to the little girl who seemed, in her own odd way, to be sharing her fate, while below my mother gaily entertained her loud friends at a glittering table laden with goodies and favors and sweets and decorated with a large silver sculptured group of Arion being rescued from a terrifying shark.

I went in the morning to a small private girls’ school, but most of such learning as I acquired resulted from my afternoons and evenings with Hanky: large slices of Victorian verse and European history with emphasis on Great Britain’s glorious assimilation of the globe. Hanky also kept a sacred scrapbook into which she lovingly pasted photographs of the royal family that she had cut out from magazines retrieved from the trash.

When we touched on the darker sides of history, such as the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, which Hanky saw as the splendid but doomed predecessor of Britain’s, when she sighed over the lamentable spectacle of tall marble columns being toppled by hairy men in bearskins, I noted that she had begun to emphasize the survival of Rome in some of the great families of the Renaissance: the Medici, the Dorias, the Estes. I asked her what this new promotion was all about, and she confessed that my mother had instructed her to teach me something about Italian nobility, as my parents were planning that I should accompany them on a trip to Tuscany.

"But since when did Mother care what I knew about the people she meets? Or hopes to meet?"

I’m sure I don’t know, dear. I do what I’m told. And I’ve had to read whole chapters of John Addington Symonds!

Well, I’d much rather learn about the barbarians. I knew how to get poor Hanky’s goat, and though I loved her I could never resist it. Do you think the Kaiser might be the modern Attila? Born to bring the British Empire down?

Hanky sniffed. He’ll have the Royal Navy to contend with! That should give him pause!

And perhaps he’d have too much respect for his grandmother to think of invading the country she rules!

I knew that to Hanky this blood tie was the supreme irony of modern history.

It wouldn’t be his English blood that would stop him! He never had the advantage of a good English education.

English blood? Surely Queen Victoria herself is entirely German?

But she was raised as an English princess.

By a German governess. Hanky had taught me too well!

But in an English court. Surrounded by English ladies and gentlemen.

Now how was it, my reader may ask, that, emotionally isolated as I was, I could so clearly see not only my parents as Hanky saw them but Hanky as my parents so condescendingly saw her? How was I able to stand back and correct the exaggerations of each viewpoint? And how could I be so fond of Hanky and still see how silly she was? Or respect my mother for her force and willpower, even when I took in how faintly maternal she was, or dryly assessed the weakness of my father’s bluster, even while I yearned for some share of his devotion?

I can only offer the explanation that the way I somehow managed to cope with a world that seemed to have so little place for me was to step out of it as far as I could and view it as a play or spectacle. And then judge it? Was that revenge, or simply a means of survival? At any rate I never took for granted that the world had to make sense. Or even that my life did.

It was through Enid Goldstein, a pretty but snotty girl in my class at school, a natural leader and inclined to be scornful of my dim looks and small stature, that I learned of my family’s matrimonial plans for me. Enid’s object in telling me (she never dreamt that I didn’t know) was to assure me how little she was impressed by my mother’s choice.

I gather every other man in Wop Land is a count, she told me.

But, Enid, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

You really don’t know? That your family’s got an Italian nobleman picked out for you? Count Gulinelli. From Ferrara. My mother told me all about it. Your mother met him at a charity tea and was immediately swept off her feet.

"You mean she fell in love with him."

Well, with his title, anyway. And his lovely old mortgaged palazzo. Mummie says your ma wants to emulate the Vander bilts and Goulds and have a titled son-in-law.

It was too much for me. For a moment I could only gasp. But, I cried when I had caught my breath, I’ve heard Mother say a dozen times that this running after coronets was ridiculous. ‘Un-American,’ she called it. ‘Typical Fifth Avenue.’

"Well, I guess now she’s decided it’s time Riverside Drive had its own peerage. And she will be the pioneer!"

"But she can’t make me marry him, can she?"

No, but she can sure put the heat on you. Enid looked at me scornfully. Do you think you can really stand up to her, Blanche? Even when she’s backed by your old man?

Father? What does he care about Italian counts?

I hear from mine that he’s up to his neck in a Venetian perfume deal. And he’s hired the count as his front man to handle the Italians!

My parents did not at once confirm Enid’s prediction, but a week later Count Gulinelli was their guest at dinner, and I was seated next to him, which was not my customary place with a guest of honor, and he devoted more attention to me than I usually received from any man who had Mother on his other side. His manners, I admit, were good, perhaps too good, and his compliments elegant if on the florid side. He obviously meant little of what he said, but he made me think twice before condemning a social code that did things so prettily. He was not really handsome; he was too thin, too angular, too jerkily active, but he had sleek, glossy black hair, shiny eyes and a rather fine aquiline nose. He was approaching forty but seemed younger; idleness, at least until his employment by Father, had preserved his bloom.

Mother, as Enid had suggested, seemed obsessed with him. She could hardly spare his attentions to me, even though she had presumably requested them. She had learned a few phrases of Italian and embarrassed me